To coincide with today's launch of the rebooted Tomb Raider, writer and poet Sabrina
Mahfouz, explains why the TV, film and the video games industry needs
more Lara Crofts at the heart of the action.

It’s 2011. Edinburgh Festival. The Fringe. I’m in it. Got a solo show in fact. Do alright. Twenty-four nights of repeating myself when I’m not even drunk. I also have lists of shows I’ve seen and loved. It’s been brilliant.

But, the experience is tempered when I meet a man who wrote the stories for some very well-known computer games. The exploits are famous – accused of inciting violence, rape, robbery and misogyny. So my question to him over festival noise was simple – how come all the female characters were so rubbish in these games? He probably wasn’t shocked by this as it gets asked a lot. So he gave an easy answer: “So, like, girls don’t really have adventures do they? I mean, not those type of adventures. I mean, if you want to go themed that’s different – like Lara Croft – but not just everyday, street crime type of happenings, you know?”

Lara Croft of old

This p****d me off lots. Not really because I thought girls should be valued for their contribution to ‘street crime type of happenings’ – but because I thought he was so posh he’d probably never even been inside a MaccyDs, let alone known any boys who’d had ‘those types of adventures’ either. Yes, a bit prejudice of me I know, but it was something that I kept thinking about.

All these people creating things that they said were reflecting reality, when in fact they were just reflecting stories they had already seen or heard that were fictionalized by others first and so now they believed that it really was only men who got up to these criminal adventures. And, if the women did anything other than get raped, they obivously did it in a shiny black catsuit or hot-pants. Naturally.

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I’ve worked in lots of places where lots of women are having criminal adventures (bars, stip joints and the like). None of them were wearing catsuits at the time. It might be true that less of them are in prison for what they do over the men, but maybe they just don’t get caught. With this knowledge, I decided to try and write a tale of three females who could easily be the basis of crime/adventure-based computer games and bring hundreds of ‘those type of adventures’ out of their designer handbags before you can say hashtag. No male leads. No themes. Just everyday ‘clean crime’ type of happenings. ‘Clean’ crime, by the way, is basically characterized by a supposed lack of direct bloodshed. This includes fraud, smuggling of certain things - but no drugs and no violence. This is how my play, Clean, currently part of Scotland’s annual A Play, A Pie and A Pint season, was born.

I will stress here that I am not advocating female criminal masterminds as feminist role models (but we all want to be one, just a little, at some point). But I do think there is a responsibility in creative mediums to show as vast and as varied female characters as is imaginatively possible. Of course, there are already some, and I would say it is slowly improving, but one night spent watching mainstream TV or playing video games and you're still more likely to see more women as prostitutes, sex objects and victims than any other characters. Even theatre still has a ratio of 2:1 male to female characters on stage - perhaps a result of only a minority of plays being produced in the UK being written by women.

Angelina Jolie played Lara Croft in the movie version

But I digress. Let’s get back to this computer game shame. The statistics on who buys and plays games you might find surprising. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 47 per cent of US gamers are female and the numbers are similar around the world. Take into account that women also purchase approximately 85 per cent of domestic products and it seems baffling that most gaming adverts still target a specific gender. If it is thought to appeal to a woman then you can tell because it will likely have pink in it somewhere. This approach puzzles me – what with so many women buying, why is so little being done to put them at the heart of the action on the screen?

It is the same with theatre and film, 65 per cent of tickets being bought by women and yet you can quite easily find an entire season at a cinema without one film featuring solely female protagonists, whilst nearly every narrative revolves around a white male and his friends/family.

Don't capitalist values insist that there are always bigger profit margins to be made and don't you make these by catering to the market and isn't half the market saying, we are female, by the way?? Maybe they’re not saying it loud enough. There is a great list onListVerse stating the 10 most positively portrayed female video games characters – but even they readily admit that it is much easier to find ‘top tens of female characters’ for very different reasons.

I have heard of the gaming industry approaching theatre writers because they’re trying to find new, exciting storytelling. The stories need to keep up with the graphics to stay relevant, they say. So I again find it baffling that considering this and the fact that everyone from ice-cream brands to tourism boards are desperate for stories that haven't yet been told, we are still constantly seeing the male story as the ‘default life experience’. Of course this male story is narrowed down to ethnicity and sexuality and religion - depending where in the world you might be, but it is still overwhelmingly as if we must tell stories from the perspective of a man otherwise - otherwise what?

A scene from the new Tomb Raider

So my small play, Clean, told directly from the point of view of three women who happen to be leaders in their criminal fields, is not only a little way of getting different women on stage but also a wave to the games industry to say, "hey, there you are". Three women, having "those type of adventures". And being pretty good at it. And not necessarily being pretty, but maybe they are incidentally. I might be bias but I would have a go playing a computer game with my three characters - Zainab, Chloe and Katya - at the helm any day.

Check them out in Glasgow and Edinburgh this month and see if you would too…